"...This racial genealogy of the empire followed the logic of capital accumulation by expanding the market for industrial goods and securing sources of raw materials and, in particular, the prime commodity for exchange and maximizing of surplus value: cheap labor power. This confirms the enduring relevance of Oliver Cromwell Cox's proposition that 'racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict' (1948, 485)." 

- E. San Juan, Jr.

Public exchanges after September 11, 2001, somehow police themselves with the obligatory gesture of condemning the fanatical atrocity of those who feel victimized by Western civilization. Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University ruminated over the right of the U.S. nation-state in a "just war" to defend its "civic order and democratic liberties" against "the lower depths" (2001, 11). We are now conscripted into a "just" war waged against terrorists wherever the Bush administration thinks it is found, even as far as the remote jungles of the island of Basilan in the Philippines where the Abbu Sayyaf bandit group of less than a hundred is holed up--a local problem born of social neglect, military delinquency, and political corruption, which has nevertheless converted this U.S. neocolony into the next battleground after Afghanistan.

What I want to call attention to for this occasion is the new reality of what the The Nation (Dec. 17, 2001) calls the new "National Security State" especially after the passage of the Patriot Act. This omnibus law "imposes guilt by association on immigrants, rendering them deportable for wholly innocent nonviolent associational activity on behalf of any organization" labeled as terrorist by the Secretary of State. More than 1,200 aliens have been detained on mere suspicion, without any hearing or the usual safeguards to insure "due process." For the sake of protecting the "homeland," racial profiling is acceptable as one legitimate weapon. This has targeted immigrants from the Middle East, citizens in Arab American communities, and south Asians who seem to fit the profile. I don't have to remind you of the rash of violent acts, harassment, and killing of South Asians suspected of being Arabs that occurred in the few weeks after Sept. 11, perhaps a testimony to the need for more multiculturalist educational programs?

The undeclared state of war has resurrected not only the nation-state that postcolonialists taught us was obsolescent if not defunct; it has revived the coercive Leviathan in its current military emergency posture, with all the legal apparatus of McCarthyist surveillance, military tribunals, and new, secret ground rules of inclusion/exclusion for defining national subjecthood (Chitty 2002; Amin 2001).

Racism an organizing principle of social order

What is more, the dreaded meta-narratives seem to have awakened in "the night of the living dead," as it were, a primal scenario returning to haunt us, the inheritors of the tainted legacy of the Enlightenment. We cannot presume the legitimacy of the liberal democratic status quo, with citizens of color living under duress. The postmodernists, including post-socialists espousing "radical democracy," now confront the fact that the United States continues to be a racial polity, "white supremacy�as a political system in itself." In the history of the United States, racial exclusion is, as Charles Mills argues, "normative, central to the system," with racism as "the ideological correlate of a fundamental organizing principle of the "modern Euro-implanted social order" (1999, 25), and the liberal state as the prime defender of Western civilization threatened by dark-skinned terrorists and non-Christian rogue states.

In my view, any discussion on the nature of racism, identity politics, ethnic studies, and the multiculturalist problematic should immediately engage with this theme of the racial polity. The arguments on the fraught issues of pluralism, "common culture," individual liberties, civic consensus, republicanism, and so on hinge on the confrontation between these two positions:

• one that claims that the U.S. is a democratic polity where a "common culture" will eliminate through incremental reforms the problem of racism as individual prejudice, and
  
• one that holds that one major support of the class-divided polity is what Du Bois called "the wages of whiteness," whiteness as property, differential entitlement-as Derrick Bell, Cheryl Harris, David Roediger, and others have called it.

The first celebrates cultural pluralism-figured as the "melting pot" and the "Americanization" of differences, as Michael Walzer (1994) envisaged it. The ideal of cultural pluralism implies that there is a normative standard-call it the "American Way of Life," the "common culture," the Great Books, the canon, civic or republican nationalism-compared to which the other ways (not real alternatives) are alien, weird, menacing.

The second position critiques a racial polity founded on the "possessive investment in whiteness." Whichever position one finds onself aligned with, and I am afraid you cannot negotiate a middle ground, that position will determine one's stance on the numerous versions of multiculturalist pedagogy, postcolonial discourse, ethnic identity, and citizenship.

Sometime ago, Ronald Takaki countered Nathan Glazer's thesis of the "American ethnic pattern" with his theory of "racial patterns." Racial inequality persists despite legislation prohibiting discrimination based on color, race, or ethnic origins. Takaki observes: "Due to racially exclusionist forces and developments in American history, racial inequality and occupational stratification have come to coexist in a mutually reinforcing and dynamic structural relationship which continues to operate more powerfully than direct forms of racial prejudice and discrimination" (1994, 34). It might be instructive here to rehearse briefly the historical contours of this racial pattern.

A review of the geopolitical formation of the United States demonstrates a clear racial, not simply ethnic, pattern of constituting the national identity and the commonality it invokes. As oppositional historians have shown, the U.S. racial order sprang from a politics of exploitation and containment encompassing inter alia colonialism, apartheid, racial segregation, xenophobia, exploitation, marginalization, and genocide. It evolved from four key conjunctures that mark the genealogy of the social field of power and its logic of division:

• first, the suppression of the aboriginal inhabitants (Native Americans) for the exploitation of land and natural resources;
  
• second, the institutionalization of slavery and the post-Civil War segregation;
  
• third, the conquest of territory from the Mexicans, Spaniards (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam), and Hawaiians, together with the colonization of Mexicans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans; and,
  
• fourth, the subordination of Asian labor (Kolko 1984; Goldfield 1997).

This racial genealogy of the empire followed the logic of capital accumulation by expanding the market for industrial goods and securing sources of raw materials and, in particular, the prime commodity for exchange and maximizing of surplus value: cheap labor power. This confirms the enduring relevance of Oliver Cromwell Cox's proposition that "racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict" (1948, 485).

With the end of the Cold War and the globalization of a "free-market" regime, a new phase of the "culture wars" has begun. This is an ideological-political conflict symptomatic of the organic crisis of capitalism as a historical stage of sociality and human development. One manifestation of this debates is Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations," the replacement of class/national struggles with the putative rivalry between the Islamic/Confucian axis and a monolithic Western dispensation.

In the context of economic recession and aggravated urban problems after 1989 (Los Angeles, Cincinnati), the problem of cultural ethos has become the major site of racial categorization and conflict. In scholastic circles, we observe the confrontation of two irreconcilable positions: one that claims the priority of a "common culture," call it liberal or civic nationalism, as the foundation for the solidarity of citizens; and another that regards racism or a racializing logic as inherent in the sociopolitical constitution of the United States, a historical episteme undercutting the universalizing rhetoric of its proclaimed democratic ideals and principles (Perea 1998). Attempts to mediate the dispute, whether through the artifice of a "multicultural nationalism" or a post-ethnic cosmopolitanism (Hollinger 1998), have only muddled the precise distinctions laid out by the various protagonists.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, inflected in terms of cultural literacy, canon-revision, the debate between Eurocentrism versus Afrocentrism, and corollary antagonisms, has become the major site of philosophical contestation. It has become a field of forces in which the exercise of symbolic violence preempts the functioning of communicative rationality and supplements the coercive surveillance of citizen-subjects. In clarifying why cultural identity has suddenly become salient in the terrain of multiple social antagonisms, however, it would be useful to invoke here again Gramsci's ideas about ideological disputes functioning as synecdoches for deeper, protracted systemic conflicts.

Hegemony is the key concept that unlocks the political ambiguity of multiculturalism within the analytic framework of mapping the relations of social forces in any given conjuncture. Gramsci postulated that hegemony (political and intellectual leadership) in most societies is realized through a combination of peaceful incremental reforms (voluntary consent from the majority) and violent struggles (coercive domination). Hegemony incorporates the working of symbolic violence shown in the "transfiguration of relations of domination and subordination into affective relations, the transformation of power into charisma" (Bourdieu 1998, 102).

Culture wars are thus engagements for ideological-moral positions that at some point will generate qualitative changes in the terms of engagement and thus alter the balance of political-economic power in favor of one social bloc against another.

In modern industrial formations, the struggle is not just to occupy City Hall, as it were, but also (from a dialectical, strategic point of view) to mobilize the masses in order to transform the relations of power, their bases and modality, on both material and symbolic levels.

With the demise of the welfare state and the end of the Cold War, the Self/Other binary persists as the integrating paradigm that underpins token programs of multiculturalism with all their infinite permutations. I recently read the colorful polycentric multiculturalism that Robert Stam has proposed which "calls for a kind of diasporization of desire, the multiplication, the cross-fertilization, and the mutual relativization of social energies" (1997, 200). Wonderful!

Could a multiculturalist strategy of peacefully managing differences have prevented the 1992 Los Angeles riot if it were deployed earlier?

Is the question of ethnic difference, the politics of identity, reducible to the celebration of cultural diversity?

How does a group claim to be distinctive and different?

Can the expression of cultural difference be tolerated as long as it pays deference to the prior claims of civic nationalism?

Does the notion of citizenship-the abstract owner of property--premised on the universalizing discourse of individualism resolve inequalities of class, gender and race?

If ethnicity is not primordial but a strategic choice, will reforms of the now obsolescent "welfare state" curtail institutional racism and racist violence?

With the demise of liberal programs of amelioration and safety nets, will "ethnicity" still function as before by legitimizing stratification and inequality as a result of disparate cultural norms and folkways? ?

Is multiculturalism a reformist tactic for carrying out those highly touted neoliberal goals of stabilization, deregulation, and privatization that have caused untold misery for millions?

Multiculturalism is celebrated today as the antiphony to the fall of the "Evil Empire" and the triumph of the free market, the performative self as model consumer and exemplary shopper. Ishmael Reed (1998), among the multiliterati, has trumpeted the virtues of "America: The Multinational Society." The rubric "multinational" is meant to vindicate the thought of Du Bois, the proponents of La Raza Unida, and the theories of internal colonialism. Ironically, however, Reed declares somewhat naively that "the United States is unique in the world: The world is here" in New York City, Los Angeles, and so on. Reed, I suspect, doesn't mean that the problems of the underdeveloped subaltern formations have come in to plague American cities. With this figure of subsumption or synecdochic linkage, the imperial center reasserts a privileged role in the world--all the margins, the absent Others, are redeemed in a hygienic uniform space where cultural differences dissolve or are sorted out into their proper niches in the ranking of national values and priorities. Multicultural USA then becomes the ultimate prophylaxis for the loss of global economic superiority and endemic social decay.

We are now supposed to accept a fait accompli: plural cultures or ethnicities coexisting peacefully, without serious contestation, in a free play of monads in "the best of all possible worlds." No longer a melting pot but a salad bowl, a smorsgasbord of cultures, our society subsists on the mass consumption of variegated and heterogeneous lifestyles. There is of course a majoritarian subject-position-tune in to the six o'clock news-- to which we add any number of fragments of particularisms, thus proving that our principle of sophisticated tolerance can accommodate those formerly excluded or ignored. Even recusant denizens can be invited to the Mall of America. Why not? It's a bazaar for anyone who can buy, though it may turn out that your particular goods are not as valuable or significant as mine. Assorted postality sages are accessories to this fashionable cosmopolitanism.

Multiculturalism and Social Equality

On closer scrutiny, this bureaucratic mechanism of inclusion-what Herbert Marcuse once called "repressive desublimation"--is a mode of appropriation: it fetishizes and commodifies others. The self-arrogating universal swallows the unsuspecting particulars in a grand hegemonic compromise. Indeed, retrograde versions of multiculturalism celebrate in order to fossilize differences and thus assimilate "others" into a fictive gathering which flattens contradictions pivoting around the axis of class. Questions of identity (racial, gender, sexual, etc.) need to be framed within the totality of social relations articulated with determinate modes of production. Other versions grant cultural autonomy but hide or ignore structural inequalities under the umbrella of a refurbished humanist cosmopolitanism- a totality that homogenizes all the atoms contained in its space. And so the noisy border-crossers like Guillermo Gomez Pena or Coco Fusco, our most provocative agitprop artists, are constantly reminded that to gain full citizenship, unambiguous rules must be obeyed: proficiency in English is mandatory, assimilation of certain procedures and mores assumed, and so on and so forth.

Cultural pluralism first broached in the twenties by Horace Kallen has been refurbished for the imperatives and exigencies of the "New World Order." What the current Establishment multiculturalism elides, however, is the history of the struggles of people of color--both those within the metropolis and in the far-flung outposts of finance capital.

While the political armies of racial supremacy were defeated in World War II, the practices of the capitalist nation-states continue to reproduce the domination and subordination of racialized populations in covert and subtle ways.

The citizen-subject, citizenship as self-ownership with the right to buy and sell (that is, alienate own's own labor-power), demonstrates the universalizing virtue of the liberal nation-state. Citizenship remains defined by the categories that govern the public sphere of exchange and the marketplace, categories denominating race, geopolitical location, gender, nationality, sexuality, and so on (Peller 1995). While globalization may render national boundaries porous, the U.S. nation-state continues to institutionalize social differences in national structures of enfranchisement, property law, and therefore of exploitation. This transpires amid profound social crisis that has undermined emancipatory projects and the autonomy of collective agencies. As Stephen Steinberg has tirelessly argued, "the essence of racial oppression [in the U.S.]-our grand apartheid-is a racial division of labor, a system of occupational segregation" (2000, 64).

The racial polity is a thoroughly nationalized machine for reproducing racialized class hierarchy that sustains and informs the political economy of capital accumulation.

Multiculturalism in its diverse modalities has indeed become the official policy designed to solve racism and ethnic conflicts in the North. Contextualized in the history of transnational capitalism, however, multiculturalism tends to occlude if not cancel out the material conditions of racist practices and institutions. It conceals not only the problematic of domination and subordination but reconstitutes this social relation in a political economy of difference where privatized sensibilities and sensoriums become the chief organs of consumerist experience. The performative self fragments the public sphere into self-replicating monadic entities equipped with customized survival kits. In short, neoliberal multiculturalism idealizes individualist pluralism as the ideology of the "free market" and its competitive utilitarian ethos.

A historical-materialist frame of interpretation may enable us to appreciate what is involved in the struggle over classification and delimitation of social space and the fields of symbolic power. In a polity (such as the United States) configured by a long history of class divisions articulated with gender, race, nationality, and locality, the claim that there is a single moral consensus, "habits of the heart," or communitas can only be a claim for the ascendancy of a particular ruling group. And it is around the moral-intellectual leadership of a social bloc, which translates into effective hegemony, that hierarchy and stratification, along with the norms and rules that constitute canons and disciplinary regimes, become legitimized. This is also the locus of struggle over who defines the nation, authorizes the criteria of citizenship, and sanctions violence.

Liberal Pluralism

Liberal pluralism and its variants obfuscate this hegemonic process conducted via wars of position and maneuver (to use Gramsci's terminology). Establishment pluralism exalts diversity, multiple identities, as "a condition of human existence rather than as the effect of an enunciation of difference that constitutes hierarchies and asymmetries of power" (Scott 1992, 14). From this pluralist perspective, group differences and discrete ethnic identities are cognized in a static categorizing grid; that is to say, they are not examined relationally or dialectically as related systems constructed through various processes of discursive and practical enunciation of differences.

Cultural pluralism then legitimates and reinforces the status quo of differential power based on asymmetrical positioning in social space and on unequal property relations.

Viewed from this angle, the "common culture" interpellates individuals and articulates them in a commonality of monadic identities. Instead of a composite identity over determined by manifold lines of interests and affiliations, one acquires an identity defined by this shared heritage with its naturalized closure and its exclusivist fiat. Implicit here is the constitutive role of the market, specifically the buying and selling of labor as commodity, which guarantees and is predicated on individual rights, the foundation of bourgeois civil law and procedural liberty.

Thus, if the "common culture" of Hirsch, Schlesinger, and others is affirmed by the status quo in mainstream education, workplace, family, and other institutional matrices of subjectivity, then there will be no room for encountering, much less recognizing, the dignity and integrity of un-common texts, expressive practices, and deviant expressions of people of color within and outside the North American continent. This is so given the fact that, to paraphrase George Lipsitz's (1998) thesis, the racial polity's ruinous pathology in the "possessive investment in whiteness" perpetuates the absence of mutuality, responsibility, and justice. We should then disabuse ourselves that there is equality of cultures and genuine toleration of differences in a racial polity sustained by an unjust political economy. No doubt, culture wars (both of position and maneuver) will continue until the present hegemonic order is transformed and ethnic antagonisms sublated to another level where a more genuinely egalitarian resolution can be realized.

We need to be cautious about the possible cooptative and compromising effect of the liberal brand of "multiculturalism" commodified by the globalized marketplace. Its answer to inequalities of power and privilege is to add and relativize Others' modalities of interaction without altering the underlying hierarchy of status and class. This pragmatic species of multiculturalism, color-blind and gender-blind, elides the actual differences in systemic power relations immanent in the lived experiences of communities, peoples, and nations. In fact it apologizes for the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, and overall class exploitation that prevail, sanctioned by the instrumentalities of government and the Realpolitik of international agencies.

Given the time-space coordinates of cultures conceived as "designs for living" or signifying practices that produce meaning and value for groups, it is untenable to posit a homogeneous culture as the definitive index of a complex society.

Instead of fixing on the abstract and large cultural configuration at play in any society, we should conceive of historically specific cultures that stand to one another in relations of domination and subordination, in struggle with one another.

One might recall that Raymond Williams once suggested that we construe any social formation as comprised of stratified layers of dominant, residual, and emergent cultures in varying degrees of tension with one another. The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies proposed an analogous approach:

"We must move at once to the determining relationships of domination and subordination in which these configurations stand; to the processes of incorporation and resistance which define the cultural dialectic between them; and to the institutions which transmit and reproduce 'the culture' (i.e. the dominant culture) in its dominant or hegemonic form" (1976, 12-13).

Hazel Carby warns us that "because the politics of difference work with concepts of diversity rather than structures of dominance, race is a marginalized concept" (1990, 85) replaced by ethnic diversity. Instead of revealing the structures of power at work in the racialization of a social order, "a social formation structured in dominance by the politics of race," academic multiculturalism fosters ethnic separatisms among the oppressed in the guise of celebrating the virtues of every ethnic group and culture. Carby elaborates:

"By insisting that 'culture' denotes antagonistic relations of domination and subordination, this perspective undermines the pluralistic notion of compatibility inherent in multiculturalism, the idea of a homogeneous national culture (innocent of class or gender differences) into which other equally generalized Caribbean or Asian cultures can be integrated. The paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the concept of dominant and subordinate cultures-either indigenous or migrant-and fails to recognize that the existence of racism relates to the possession and exercise of politico-economic control and authority and also to forms of resistance to the power of dominant social groups (quoted in San Juan 1992, 128-29)."

In effect, an integrative liberal version of multiculturalism can celebrate (in order to fossilize) differences within an imagined national community. Cultural autonomy may hide or ignore structural inequalities under the umbrella of a refurbished "humanitarian" civilization. Multiculturalism thus legitimizes pluralist stratification, exploitation, and oppression in the process of capital accumulation here and worldwide (Appelbaum 1996). Even Todd Gitlin, the enemy of identity politics, suggests that race is tied to the unbridled market that "fuels fantasies of a 'moral community' surrounded by fortifications" (1995, 235).

One can of course discriminate among varieties of "multiculturalisms"--from conservative to liberal, left-liberal, critical or resistance multiculturalism (see Goldberg 1994). It is not the best polemical strategy to reduce the wide spectrum of positions to the usual binary or manichean formula. Nor is it judicious, I think, to multiply positions in a permanent state of deferment, flux, or "suspension of disbelief." Nonetheless, the "politics of difference" and identity underwriting such positions as Nancy Fraser and other well-intentioned social democrats, reduce class to a "mode of social differentiation" (Fraser 1997, 17), an index of identity, as equally functional for this purpose as race, gender, sexuality, etc. That is a serious and recurrent mistake. In the spirit of Weberian sociologism, they tend to reify "superstructural" differences into almost intractable social and political disjunctions, rendering dialogue and communication among groups impossible-and this, despite their desire to combine both the politics of recognition and of redistribution in a gradualist evolutionary scheme of reforming the polity without fundamentally altering the market and commodity-exchange, that is, the basic contradiction between capital and labor.

Confronting this quandary, we need to return to our point of departure: the historicity of the racial polity and the strategy of ascertaining which of the projects of social transformation will lay the groundwork for the change of racializing patterns of cultural interpretation and evaluation. I believe that is the project of dissolving the iniquitous social relations of production, the labor-capital contradiction, which I submit is key to unraveling the antinomies and dilemmas of reification.

Commonality essential to diversity

Paradoxically, some notion of commonality is needed to recognize diversity. It is implicit in the Establishment version of multiculturalism as pluralism with a more nuanced, sophisticated tolerance of differences. The French philosopher Colette Guillaumin has elucidated the axiomatic presence of hierarchy underneath or behind the egalitarian articulation of difference in democratic regimes. What exactly is the ideological significance of this paradox? Guillaumin explains:

"To speak of 'difference' is to articulate a rule, a law, a norm-briefly, an absolute which would be the measure, the origin, the fixed point of a relationship, by which the 'rest' would be defined�. It is quite simply the statement of the effects of a power relationship�. [Difference presupposes] a source of evaluation, a point of reference, an origin of the definition�. The definition is seen for what it is: a fact of dependence and a fact of domination" (1995, 250-51).

It is clear, then, that the marker of difference is diacritical, with opposites coexisting in suspended tension. Is there a way of untangling this web of interdependencies so as to seize an opportunity for mass intervention?

In the globalized environment of profit-making and renewed ethnic conflicts around the world, we are faced with ethical/moral questions that cannot be divorced from the political economy of relations among groups, nation-states, regional alliances, and so on. With migration (refugees, diasporic movements, genocidal expulsion) as the salient fact of this century, the dialectics of Othering has become more vexed and fraught.

The politics of cultural difference, or what Stuart Hall (1998) calls the "pluralization of cultural difference," has intertwined processes of racialization and ethnicization that needs to be finely discriminated. Ideas of postcolonial syncretism and hybridity cannot account for the forced diaspora of millions of migrant workers (for example, nine million Filipino Overseas Contract Workers spread around the world) whose relational vicissitudes the conventional theories of transnational citizenship or laissez-faire pragmatism cannot fully make sense of.

Cultural difference sells

It will soon become clear that the multiculturalist problematic operates effectively as a hegemonic scheme of peacefully managing the crisis of race, ethnicity, gender and labor in the North, a way of neutralizing the perennial conflicts in the system (Palumbo-Liu 1995). By containing diversity in a common grid, multiculturalism preserves the ethnocentric paradigm of commodity relations that generate particularisms in the experience of life-worlds within globalizing capitalism. Cultural difference sells. In "Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism," Slavoj Zizek points out that "postmodern racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late capitalism" (1997, 37). The inherent contradiction of the liberal democratic project, for Zizek, lies in its objectification of the Other, reducing the others-minorities, strangers, immigrants, undocumented aliens, refugees, and so on-into folkloric spectacles or objects, the "ethnic Thing" supposedly liberated from the predatory alienating market and the reign of commodity-fetishism. Against the radical chic of postmodernist nihilism, Zizek cogently formulates one of the most powerful critiques of multiculturalism as a historical phenomenon:

And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people-as 'natives' whose mores are to be carefully studied and 'respected.' That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism: in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multiculturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one's own particular culture.

Racism with a distance

In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a 'racism with a distance'-it 'respects' the Other's identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed 'authentic' community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn't oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures-the multiculturalist respect for the Other's specificity is the very form of asserting one's own superiority.

Conclusion

�.The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism-the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds-which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism-since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay-critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact�. (1997, 44, 46).

I suggest that we ponder seriously Zizek's critique of neopragmatic multiculturalism before we celebrate its putative virtues and lament the pathos of its inadequacies. "Corporate national populism" deploying notions of cultural/ethnic absolutism can advance their postmodern agendas for racial apartheid by mobilizing multiculturalist rhetoric and policy strategies (Solomos and Beck 1996).

Culture as ethnic distinction then reinforces the legitimacy of the racial polity. Opposed to those who insist on conformity to a monolithic pattern of conduct, I am for the recognition of the integrity and value of peoples' cultures and life-forms, and for their collective right to exist and flourish. But how can this recognition of multiplicity and autonomous singularities be universalized? I believe it cannot happen as long as the global logic of corporate accumulation determines the everyday life of people on this planet. To lay the groundwork for a genuine popular-democratic esteem for cultural differences, class divisions must be abolished first with the socialization of productive property and the equalization of competencies. Iniquitous property relations hidden by commodity-fetishism ground the reification of social life. Power relations are anchored on the iniquitous division of social labor which frames unequal distribution of wealth and devaluation of specific cultures.

I believe that multiculturalism, as long as it is conceived within the existing framework of the racial polity, of a hegemonic order founded on inequities in social relations of production and reproduction, cannot offer the means to realize justice and the recognition of peoples' singular identities and worth. We need to be critical of this easy way out of the present crisis. The multiculturalist respect for the Other's individuality may indeed prove to be the very form of asserting one's own superiority. This paradox underlies multiculturalism as, in fact, the authentic "cultural logic of multinational" or globalized capitalism. So I am afraid the terror of racism will be with us in this new millennium as long as the conditions that produce and reproduce class relations, in effect the material armature of the racial polity, remain the sine qua non for the reproduction and legitimation of the dominant social structures and institutional practices of our everyday lives.

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Walzer, Michael. 1994. "Multiculturalism and Individualism." Dissent (Spring): 185-191.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1997. "Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism," New Left Review 225 (Sept-Oct): 28-51.

E. San Juan, Jr. is currently visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at National Tsing Hua University and Academia Sinica fellow in Taiwan. He was 2003 Fulbright professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

His recent books are RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press) and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press), as well as two books in Filipino last July: HIMAGSIK (De La Salle University Press) and TINIK SA KALULUWA AT IBA PANG AKDA (Anvil).

Also read ...

Cultural Politics, U.S. Imperialist War of Terror, and Socialist Revolution in the Philippines, by E. San Juan, Jr. (Axis of Logic, October, 2004) 

and ...

Mike Pozo's Interview of the E. San Juan, Jr. (Axis of Logic, April, 2004)